I’ve been buying CDs from charity shops for a few years now. You find all sorts of hidden treasures, and you’re giving money to a local cause rather than a streaming service. Used cassettes and LPs are fun too, though you have pay close attention to their condition or you’ll get something warped, scratched up, mouldy, or some unfortunate combination of the above. Paying close attention… huh, what a concept. Turns out this does apply to CDs too. I’ve thus far had no issues with scra...

Someone stated in the early days of the war, a feeling that was reciprocated by the soldier in khaki and the sailor in blue, that a mechanical device would be the determining factor in ending the world conflict, favorably, of course, for the United States and her allies. 1 One of my common topics is the history of nuclear weapons . The "atom bomb" is a rich vein of history because its impact has been as much cultural as technical. Dramatic depictions like Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer...

A huge problem I encounter with Magic: The Gathering (MTG) is that there are thousands of cards in the game (around 33000 unique cards as of the time of writing). Depending on the format you play, you may be required to select a limited subset of these cards to play with. A common social format is the Cube draft or Cube. You and a group select and refine ~300-700 cards to create a custom set. While many players enjoy the process of selecting and refining every single card, I usually know a few...

Storm Boelo has been passing through Scotland for the last many hours, and high winds are expected to remain for the rest of the day. This weekend has thus been one of staying inside and staying cosy: of drinking tea (and the remainder of the coffee I had in a bag in the cupboard), making zines, and watching some television. The winds as I write feel slightly less intense than they were in the morning, but suffice to say I am much happier – and safer – staying indoors than I would be braci...

After hiking up to the end of the ridge, it was now time to scout the initial part. The starting point is some 25km east of where I parked the car last time around, at the parking spot of the Italian ossuary in the lovely town of Kobarid. The plan is to walk my way up till the beginning of the ridge, reaching Starijski Vrh at the foothills of Mount Stol, the highest point of the entire ridge, at 1673 meters. The reason why I’m doing this hike is that I read conflicting information abou...

aosa : source for the website of The Architecture of Open Source Applications . archive : a GitHub repository with the remains of old projects. asimpy : source for a discrete event simulation package I wrote. bib : PDFs of 1800 papers, of which I’ve actually read about half. bin : little software tools I’ve cobbled together. books : PDFs of books I’ve bought. bram : source for Jon Udell’s agent management tool . catmaid : source for the Collaborative Annotation Toolkit...

By Roberto Perez Alcolea , Java Platform Team Quasar connects a proposed API change with observed references in consumer repositories, giving the producer evidence for a release decision At Netflix, shared Java libraries support applications developed across a large, independently evolving repository ecosystem. A library change begins in one repository, but its impact can reach many others. Producers can see the API diff in front of them. What they often cannot see is who still depends on the...

FedEx closed fiscal 2026 with about 300,000 permanent full-time and 230,000 permanent part-time employees, according to its 10-K for the year ended May 31, 2026. Two business exits followed: FedEx Freight on June 1 and FedEx Supply Chain on October 1. These FedEx employee statistics cover headcount, unit splits, union status, hourly pay, turnover and labor costs from 2025 and 2026 filings and pay data. FedEx Employee Statistics ~230,000 Permanent part-time employees at FedEx on May 31, ...

It’s good to get outside, unplug from it all, and spend time with the birds. Sometimes they’re friendly! 📷 Olympus OM-20, Zuiko 200mm f /4 🎞️ Kodak Ultramax 400 It’s good to get outside, unplug from it all, and spend time with the birds. Sometimes they’re friendly! 📷 Olympus OM-20, Zuiko 200mm f /4 🎞️ Kodak Ultramax 400 It’s good to get outside, unplug from it all, and spend time with the birds. Someti...

(Lance and Bill did a vidcast about the OpenAI Document Drop. See  here . My spellcheck thinks that vidcast and OpenAI are not words.)   The Metric TSP problem is TSP where, for all vertices \(x,y,z\),                                      \(w(x,z) \le  w(x,y) + w(y,z) \). In 1976 Christofides and Serdyukov (independently of each other) showed that there is a poly time algorithm for a 1.5-approx to Metric TSP. Some people thought the 1.5 could be improved. Some people thoug...

Thought I’d make a quick blog post about some weird behavior I’m seeing on iOS 27 and Dynamic Island live activities, that I initially thought was restricted to the Duo, but turns out affects everything. Yay. Maybe this post can save some others some time, and hopefully Apple can fix it. Long story short, ever since iOS 16.1 introduced “Live Activities”, where we can display handy little widgets in the Dynamic Island, there’s been a bunch of different configurations for showing thing...

Bryan Cantrill has a great line from a talk where he cautions against anthropomorphizing 1 Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. I think it’s also a mistake to treat any tech company like a person. Here’s the full quote: You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think ‘oh, the lawnmower hates me’ — lawnmower does...

Since early this year, Michael Malis (of pgrust ) has been showing me interesting things he's done and saying [W]e should be more ambitious 1 with the software we build There is, understandably, a lot of skepticism about projects like pgrust because there are so many low-quality AI-generated projects out there. If I didn't know Malis and didn't look into it, I would just assume that pgrust was another vibe slopped project that's never going to work. But I know Malis well enough to tr...

Hello, Welcome to another Friday. This week marks exactly 2 years since the Space Age release . 2.1 Stable After a long summer in experimental, 2.1 is now marked as stable. Thank you to everyone who played the experimental, reported bugs, and gave us feedback. A lot of the changes and tweaks since the first 2.1 release came directly from your reports. We took this opportunity to update our classic Factorio trailer one last time. As ...

I’ve been working as a fractional CMO and enterprise SEO consultant for over 2 years now. So yes, I’m going to spend the next 1900+ words convincing you how colossally stupid it would be for you to hire me. Or any other fractional CMO. What You Actually Get When Hiring a Fractional CMO You may think you’re getting a third of someone’s time at a third of the price. You are not. It’s more like 15% of the time at 50% of the price. First, the full-time CMO baseline...

Gergely Orosz is frustrated at those that entered his explicitly “No AI” essay competition and used AI. He goes on to say: When I start to suspect some part is AI about someone I don’t know: how can I tell how much of it is? And how much time and effort do I want to invest to figure out? I fear most people do not realize this last part: that when it takes time and effort from others to figure out what % is AI, and what % is YOU, then I will simply assume it’s probably 100% A...

I am sorry to announce that the message.casa service will soon be closing. 2026-10-25 9:40 Some people have taken advantage of the service’s anonymity to send threatening messages that have been classified as terrorist in nature by governmental agencies. Moderation, which I had hoped would be a one-off, is becoming very difficult to manage. It is no longer possible to create new accounts on the platform, and it will be permanently closed on 31 December 2026. For your information, the reput...

Hooman. I believe it is dinner time. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . Hooman. I believe it is dinner time. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ ...

The Great Day of His Wrath, by John Martin, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at minimum lot sizes, Boeing’s next 737 MAX, Fervo short sellers, Figure AI’s training data, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. No essay this week, but I’m working on a piece about manufacturing isotopes that should be o...

Since learning about the effects of high CO2 concentration on attention and cognitive performance—especially at levels much higher than 2000ppm—I've started monitoring CO2 and other air quality indicators in my house, at my studio, and even on the road. I have a few other air quality monitors I'll be covering in the future, but today I wanted to focus on one I only heard about in the comments on a recent video tearing down a cheap no-name 'Air Quality Detector' from Amazon . Since l...

How a 2001 business sim rendered its rich and detailed cities. How a 2001 business sim rendered its rich and detailed cities.

A forlorn businessman resting his head against a wall beside a window. Photo by Andrea Piacquadio, via Pexels. In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-89078 for the project Ruby , site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix a double free in Ruby's Onigmo regular expression parser when parsing fails after an alternation, allowing memory corruption and potential remote code execution in applicat...

Following our blog on Autonomy Factories , this is the second in our series exploring autonomy. An unmanned aircraft is tracking a vehicle during an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance mission. The vehicle disappears beneath the tree line. As the aircraft searches the surrounding terrain, its communications link is disrupted and the operator loses contact. The operator can no longer intervene, but the mission must continue. The aircraft’s mission autonomy software, or autonomou...